"I became a total Republican playing this game" - Larry Borowsky (1992)

April 10, 2021 5:30 AM

City simulators like SimCity are serious games — the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say: a simulation of a city. But any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and the model underpinning SimCity has quite the history. In the video above, I unboxed the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time.
posted by octothorpe (45 comments total)

Funny, I became something between a Roosevelt Democrat and a Godless Commie thanks largely to SimCity and its sequels. When I bought into that Laffer Curve bullshit it always ended in a downward spiral of deferred maintenance and declining revenue.
posted by wierdo at 5:43 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

This has been a well-known fault in the SimCity games for a good long time. Practically since they first hit the market. Luckily, porntipsguzzardo.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:49 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

I always felt like it was pushing me towards Clinton-era New Democrat centrism. Don’t create sprawl and watch your pollution, but have a cop on every corner and keep taxes low.
posted by condour75 at 6:04 AM on April 10, 2021 [15 favorites]

It produces pretty realistic mid-size US-like cities though. Have you made your city a burned-out shithole on a rigid grid with no viable public transport system? Almost non-existent education and the only money-making business a federal prison?
You won simcity!
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:07 AM on April 10, 2021 [17 favorites]

SimCity4 is one of the greatest games ever created. I still play to this day. Education always lifts every city up so I always felt it fit great with my far left views.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:55 AM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Yep, my cities (in SimCity 2000) were basically communist utopias, except for maybe the police presence. But maybe in a city with fully-funded education and other enlightened views the police are something different than what they are in our universe? Anyway, 100% clean energy, ridiculously robust public transportation network, parks all over the place, max education funding and numerous local universities - basically everyone in town lived to 100 and had a graduate degree if they wanted one. The only real drawback is slow growth, but if you're looking for rapid short-term return and maximum growth rates, maybe you had Republican-aligned views before playing the game in the first place?
posted by LionIndex at 7:28 AM on April 10, 2021 [19 favorites]

SimCity 1 taught me that you should build exclusively mass transit, ignore any demand for roads from residents published in the local paper, and your city will prosper.
posted by migurski at 8:20 AM on April 10, 2021 [18 favorites]

City Skylines is an interesting counter-example because it's not only eclipsed SimCity at this point, but its underpinnings are very European. And the developers came to it after building a series of mass transit sims.

You can build the missing middle by finding a balance between single-family dwellings and high-rises, AND build an elaborate tram system!
posted by thecjm at 8:27 AM on April 10, 2021 [12 favorites]

Do any of the sim games disaggregate happiness etc by race or gender? Total population medians and averages can hide a host of sins.
posted by postel's law at 8:39 AM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

An alternative to the SimCity/Cities Skylines universes is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. Some amusing discourse on gameplay in this recent episode of Three Moves Ahead.
posted by mdonley at 8:40 AM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

I played Lincity years ago (the trick was to put all your dumps and polluters on the east side of the board, because the downwind effects didn't wrap around to the other side!) But never really did any of the Sims games.

But it occurs to me that a subversive project would be to add racism and susceptibility to disinformation to a game like that, just to see what happens. (Reader, I can guess what happens.) Are the SimCity games extensible with user code?
posted by spacewrench at 8:46 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

City Skylines didn't do NEARLY as well as SimCity4 though.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:50 AM on April 10, 2021

City Skylines didn't do NEARLY as well as SimCity4 though.

Citation needed. I know Cities: Skylines sold at least six million copies.
posted by Pendragon at 9:04 AM on April 10, 2021 [12 favorites]

City Skylines didn't do NEARLY as well as SimCity4 though.

Assuming you're talking about sales? Actually, It did significantly better than SimCity 4.

Best as I can tell, SimCity 4 sold something like 2 million copies and the 2013 version of SimCity did about the same. Cities Skylines didn't sell as much at launch but has had a much longer tail - and at this point looks like it's sold more copies as the last two SimCity games combined and about the same as the best selling SimCity game - SimCity 3000.

It might not be as zeitgeisty as a game with "Sim" in its title, but Cities Skylines is a huge hit
posted by thecjm at 9:18 AM on April 10, 2021 [13 favorites]

On a parallel track, I've thought a lot about how the Civ games edge you into a Republican worldview, and how that has some pretty interesting implications (FWIW, I guess this mostly applies to IV and earlier; I've played 5 and 6, but not nearly as much, and don't know if the same pattern holds). Like, to win, you absolutely have to ruthlessly keep taxes as low as possible, make your military as robust as possible, and develop a foreign policy that's either ruthlessly expansionistic or--at the very least--extremely paranoid about foreign threats. You have to have kickass tanks because Napoleon's going to get them, too, and you should probably get the bomb as fast as you can. The game absolutely rewards these worldviews, and a general zero-sum approach to just about everything, especially resources.

But: so much of that is an artifact of it being a GAME with specifically-designated victory conditions; that imposes the pressures that drive you towards a Republican worldview. If you played with an eye towards just creating a civilization that would be pleasant to live in, without caring if you won, a lot of your incentives would change and, while some of the pressures would still be there, they wouldn't be nearly as extreme or aligned.

So my big insight is that to some extent a lot of bad foreign policy is maybe the result of people unconsciously thinking that there's some kind of Game of Nations going on that they can win.
posted by COBRA! at 9:26 AM on April 10, 2021 [15 favorites]

I don't even think it's that unconcious!
posted by wellifyouinsist at 9:30 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

Good article. I do have to grumble that the article keeps implying that the bias it points out is wilful.
An understanding of bias as essentially unwilful is the only way to deal with it, this is generally true of systemic problems. Because they need sustained monitoring, and as such its better to frame the pushback as kind reminders of oversight, since both the “system” and those who see or feel its faults need to keep giving and recieving critique.
While its rarely a good time to point this out, as these are not reasonable demands to put on an individual speaking out, this, I feel, is an appropriate time to share this viewpoint, as this is analysis, and a large publication, so a higher standard is justified.
But its a good thing to keep in mind in this day and age.
posted by svenni at 9:32 AM on April 10, 2021

How Sim City Greenwashes Parking
posted by aniola at 10:07 AM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Been a long time since I played SimCity, but I feel like a lot of this comes down to:

SimCity assumes that people aren’t racist.

Which seems like a fundamental blind spot for lots of ideas from the 90s, and the techie utopianism in particular.
posted by bjrubble at 10:14 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

On a parallel track, I've thought a lot about how the Civ games edge you into a Republican worldview

Civ games are about taxing people so you can build infrastructure, and centrally managing research efforts to make a better society. Pretty much nothing happens--not so much as the construction of a simple library , shopping mall or school--unless it's done by the federal bureaucrats in Washington (or whatever your capital is).

I remember a libertarian game designer on some message board a couple decades ago who I tweaked about this, and he totally agreed and was in fact trying to make a 4X game that lived up to his mental model of what a "successful" society was and turned out to be in the middle of creating a great big flop.

I mean, your points are basically valid too. It's a game of contrasts! But I will say 9 games out of 10 on Civ IV, I'd never attack anyone, seeking science or (rarely) culture victories. I still pull it out occasionally and play a lot like people here describe Sim City, trying to make a peaceful Green Republic that leads the world economically and scientifically.
posted by mark k at 10:19 AM on April 10, 2021 [6 favorites]

I just remember the easiest way to a "successful" city was to lower taxes on the rich to the minimum, raise taxes on the poor to the maximum, and if anyone poor moved in, or any business other than high-tech moved in, just bulldoze their lot. Also, don't provide any public water - complaints would register, but it didn't actually affect anything.

So yeah, definitely pushing toward the republican view.
posted by mrgoat at 10:37 AM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

A bit of a tangent, but the 90s game I've missed the most was Railroad Tycoon and in particular the economy / city-building aspect, which is the same thing I liked about Sim City but at a large scale. Is there a modern counterpart which has that kind of scale but doesn't basically assume the 20th Century U.S. model of cars with a side of pollution as the path to success?
posted by adamsc at 10:49 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Still hoping that someone finishes Sim Refinery before the majors close theirs.
posted by eustatic at 10:49 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have plans to revisit Tropico.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:23 AM on April 10, 2021

Adamsc do you know about OpenTTD? It’s an open-source re-implementation of Transport Tycoon, and it was recently launched on Steam! (It’s been available for years via their own website but Steam distribution = more visibility). It’s still fundamentally capitalist, but there’s a lot of fun train and bus and light rail shenanigans to be had, and you do win by making more transit available to more people.

There’s also the Transport Fever games, which are more shallow, and prettier.
posted by Alterscape at 11:29 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

so much of that is an artifact of it being a GAME with specifically-designated victory conditions; that imposes the pressures that drive you towards a Republican worldview.

Or to look at it another way: the Republican worldview IS that life is game in which the goal is to accumulate as much as possible at the cost of others.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:30 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

I haven't played Sim City since high school but I remember building a city with a downtown and public transit, and walkable commercial corridors with apartments along the transit lines, probably because that's what I'd grown up with in a 1920s streetcar suburb. It seemed to work well. I don't think I tried Republican style city planning in the game, I was probably unaware of it as a possibility.
posted by sepviva at 11:31 AM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Yeah, my favorite experience with SimCity was saving Detroit by ripping out all the roads and putting in light rail. Pretty sure I got the key to the city. (Pun not intended, but fortuitous.)
posted by kristi at 12:51 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

At a fundamental level, SimCity cannot be Republican or Libertarian because the city government provides all the services and funds them through tax revenue. ALL services. Power, water, police, fire, healthcare, education (including college), roads and rail, airports, seaports, garbage collection… you name it. The city has a monopoly on these services. It’s absolutely 100% socialist.
posted by SansPoint at 1:07 PM on April 10, 2021 [8 favorites]

Well it is how modern Republicans/Libertarians actually work - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:00 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

Do any of the sim games disaggregate happiness etc by race or gender? Total population medians and averages can hide a host of sins.

The simcity series itself certainly pretends that race and gender don't exist* and that class is a perfect meritocracy which citizens ascend by accruing education (fucking lmao). I'm not sure about all of the copycat games but I've never encountered anything to the contrary.

*well, they don't exist but you know what I mean
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 4:10 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Zalzidrax: But in SimCity the socialism is for everyone. At least everyone in your city.
posted by SansPoint at 4:28 PM on April 10, 2021

I have built a LOT of cities, in both Sim Cities (mostly version 3) and Cities: Skylines, because I love urban design.

I believe that they were based off of system dynamics, but I have found that in my cities, I am rewarded with citizen happiness for emphasing the following:
- mixed density - no large areas of low density, no blocks of high density, but making sure I mixed them - and I generally keep the city at European density levels
- mixed zoning - commercial on the main roads, residential behind; no malls or large commercial districts. But I try to make sure everyone is within walking distance of a "high street" or "main street" like area
- pedestrian traffic over automobile access - in Cities, where you can pick, I'll build no 6 lane roads, four lane roads only used reluctantly, highways as rings around the city, not through it, and (if needed) I switch to one-way roads for cars and trucks
- building as much public transit as I can afford - and (especially in Cities) lots and lots of lovely parks, especially in the poorer areas.

Basically, all of my cities are based on what I personally would like, as a non-driving, urban-oriented, and (until recently) low income person. And I find that my people are quite happy, and I've never re-created urban decay in the centre - gentrification is sometimes a problem, but then I smash the fancy houses with swimming pools and replace them with an apartment building.

Basically, I run some kind of social democrat paradise, and the game rewards me with happy people, especially downtown, but also in other places (I'll often make nucleated "village" settlements in Cities:Skylines, give them their own little high street - and then they can grow together). So, I don't know much about the politics going in, but if people are getting a re-creation of US urban decay, that's not inherent in the game(s).

In Sim Cities 3000, I regularly had a dense, transit heavy city with mixed density and mixed zoning, and happy, healthy people. If you were judging from the way I play, you'd assume that the whole game is a propaganda machine for New Urbanism, and Big Public Transit. (Yes, I love that subways are stupidly cheap to build! Way cheaper than in real life).
posted by jb at 4:31 PM on April 10, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oh, and just inch that tax up slowly, and you'll get many fewer complaints. I've regularly run 10-14% taxes, just inching them up a bit at a time. They notice more when you move them too quickly.
posted by jb at 4:32 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

You can build the missing middle by finding a balance between single-family dwellings and high-rises, AND build an elaborate tram system!

I do miss the chance to zone for specifically for medium height in Cities - I much prefer it. In Sim City 3000, I could do a really nice mix of medium and high density, and so much of my city looked just like Sesame Street. I even had a thing where I'd make Bedford Square-like places of medium-rise multi-family buildings with a park in the middle to create a community gathering place - only without the fences to stop people walking across.
posted by jb at 4:36 PM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

I like most of Clayton Ashley's stuff at Polygon (see also: his great piece on Hades), and I liked this video/article. Love that he brought in Dave Amos, the channel City Beautiful is great, and everyone should check out the link in the article to donoteat01 (previously on Metafilter, though I wish Justin wasn't spending all his time on his podcast these days and got back to making Franklin videos.)

I disagree with the scolding tone of some of the comments here. Of course it's perfectly fair to criticize Sim City games for the problematic assumptions built into the sim, but if you only knew about Sim City from this thread you'd think the only way to play the game is to build the dystopia referenced in the video. The whole point of the Sim City games, indeed the thing that made so many '90s era Maxis games great, was that they were designed to be software toys not games with a predefined win condition.

Sure you can call maxing out the possible population, as in Magnasanti, "winning" but in fact there is no way to "win" in Sim City. You can lose, by going bankrupt and running out of cash, but there is nothing you can do that will trigger a "you win, the game is now over." As jb notes above it is possible to do all kinds of things within the sim, you don't have to min/max it. When I used to play Sim City 4 I would usually put the high wealth residential tax prohibitively high, just because I didn't like the building models for that wealth type, and mainly focus on low and medium wealth neighborhoods. Sim City 4 was prototyped in Excel, at root it is just a GUI slapped over a bunch of formulas just like the video says, but that doesn't mean you can't build whatever type of city you please, especially with mods.

I thought the video/article were great and raised a lot of interesting points, especially about how realizing the assumptions coded into Sim City are a microcosm of the assumptions coded into real city planning. That is the takeaway I want to talk more about. What would a game that actually puts this front and center and invites us to tinker with the assumptions underlying the sim look like?
posted by Wretch729 at 4:58 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

This Cities Skylines series on the imaginary city of Franklin, based on Philadelphia, is an examination of the way cities evolve over time. The first episode sets up a really nice contest between the way cities in reality exist in relation to a larger political world and the vacuum that simulations put them in.
posted by clockwork at 5:02 PM on April 10, 2021 [5 favorites]

I can't believe no one has linked this yet:

One of the things I used to enjoy doing was using a cheat to get an absurd amount of money, lowering taxes to zero, and then pausing the game. I would then build a paradise on Earth, a wonderful utopia for my citizens. The second I unpaused the game, BAM! the place would fill up immediately and everyone would be deliriously happy.

But then their god turned on them. I would let disasters pummel them and fail to fix the consequences. Eventually there would be huge swaths of the city with no electricity or water. Paved roads were a fond memory to the inhabitants. Fires and monsters would rage through the place unchecked for decades. Naturally, this would result in most everyone beating feet out of my city, but there was always a small percentage who stayed. Nothing seemed to make them budge.

Until I raised taxes from 0% to 1%. At that point, they’d had enough and would scram. The fires, potholes, darkness, crime, and monsters weren’t a problem but 1% taxes were an abomination up with which they would simply not put.

What SimCity 2000 was simulating there was Republicans.

posted by Mayor West at 5:31 PM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

@alfred_twu: "There's a lot of differences between different city building games, and it reflects the places where they're designed. Here's a thread on SimCity, Cities Skylines, Transport Tycoon, A-Train, and Soviet Republic." (tr)
posted by kliuless at 6:32 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you, Wretch729, I quite agree:

I disagree with the scolding tone of some of the comments here. Of course it's perfectly fair to criticize Sim City games for the problematic assumptions built into the sim, but if you only knew about Sim City from this thread you'd think the only way to play the game is to build the dystopia referenced in the video. The whole point of the Sim City games, indeed the thing that made so many '90s era Maxis games great, was that they were designed to be software toys not games with a predefined win condition.

... I thought the video/article were great and raised a lot of interesting points, especially about how realizing the assumptions coded into Sim City are a microcosm of the assumptions coded into real city planning. That is the takeaway I want to talk more about. What would a game that actually puts this front and center and invites us to tinker with the assumptions underlying the sim look like?

My memory of very early Maxis games (including Balance of Power) is that there was some discussion in the user manual about those assumptions. I would love something that made the assumptions really visible - and directly tweakable! - sort of like being able to adjust gravity in the wonderful Pinball Construction Set.

I might disagree with this, though:

in fact there is no way to "win" in Sim City. You can lose, by going bankrupt and running out of cash, but there is nothing you can do that will trigger a "you win, the game is now over."

I think my experiences with SimCity must have been with very early versions, but I distinctly remember a "You get the key to the city!" thing, which I understood to be winning.
posted by kristi at 7:30 PM on April 10, 2021

kristi: That sounds like the Scenarios that were in some versions of the original SimCity (and in SimCity 200). Those plopped you down into an existing city with a specific goal to accomplish in a certain amount of in-game time. These varied from "Just build the city up to x population" (the Dullsville scenario), to "Reduce traffic to x level" (Bern), or "Rebuild the city from an earthquake/monster attack/nuclear meltdown". If you succeeded, some versions offered you a "Key to the city"
posted by SansPoint at 7:42 PM on April 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

kristi yes it's true the scenarios had win conditions, but even then you could just keep playing the city. But yeah the scenarios, especially in the earlier versions, were very gameable in a way that definitely revealed some of the underlying assumptions baked into the game just as Ashley discusses. The crime one in particular was always easy to beat if you were willing to just bulldoze any crime area, borrow money to plop down a bunch of police stations everywhere, and then just "win" even if you had trashed the budget and/or some neighborhoods.

kliuless thanks for the link, that thread is fascinating.
posted by Wretch729 at 11:38 AM on April 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think a more useful and insightful building simulator is JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION. Sure, SimCity is modeled on these urban development theories, but EVOLUTION has dinosaurs.

Check mate.
posted by brundlefly at 3:28 PM on April 11, 2021

When I played SimCity and its sequels as a child in Britain, I assumed that the features that were unfamiliar to me were representative of differences between the UK and the USA. I saw cars drive on the right in crowded intersections, grid-based city layouts being the norm, relatively low taxation (and outrage from the population when these are increased to fund public services) and assumed that what I was experiencing were cultural differences between me and the creator of the game.

It's probably true that US city planning in general skews politically right compared to that on the other side of the pond. But playing SimCity, with its underlying model, cemented in my mind that these differences were larger, less-divisive, more culturally-ingrained than they are. In the same way as Hollywood exports to the wider world an image of what the US is "like", so do video games.

I'm pretty sure my city-planning politics weren't shifted significantly by playing SimCity, because as a child I saw it as a game of "building a city that Americans would want", and optimised accordingly: that is, according to the game's black box. But still: it clearly shaped in my impressionable young mind my image of "what the USA is like", and I think that parts its influence, including its political bias, still remain.
posted by avapoet at 1:53 AM on April 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

avapoet: I run into similar issues when playing Cities: Skylines. I'm American, and I want to build an American city (albeit one that is pedestrian friendly, has good public transit, etc.). There's mods and assets that bring the visual feel of my city more in line with my American expectations, but it still feels like it's not really expecting me to do stuff like grids and dense downtowns.

(Also, Cities: Skylines doesn't really have as much of the budget metagame that SimCity does. At a certain point, I've found I'm making enough income from taxes in my cities that I don't have to fiddle with taxes or budgeting beyond occasionally kicking up funding to power plants/water pumps to get more capacity while I'm building.)
posted by SansPoint at 9:24 AM on April 12, 2021